Global in scope and featuring thirty-five chapters from more than fifty dance, music, and theatre scholars and practitioners, The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre introduces the fundamentals of musical theatre studies and highlights developing global trends in practice and scholarship.
Investigating the who, what, when, where, why, and how of transnational musical theatre,The Routledge Companion to Musical Theatre is a comprehensive guide for those studying the components of musical theatre, its history, practitioners, audiences, and agendas. The Companion expands the study of musical theatre to include the ways we practice and experience musicals, their engagement with technology, and their navigation of international commercial marketplaces. The Companion is the first collection to include global musical theatre in each chapter, reflecting the musical’s status as the world’s most popular theatrical form. This bookbrings together practice and scholarship, featuring essays by leading and emerging scholars alongside luminaries such as Chinese musical theatre composer San Bao, Tony Award-winning star André De Shields, and Tony Award-winning director Diane Paulus.
This is an essential resource for students on theatre and performance courses and an invaluable text for researchers and practitioners in these areas of study.
Author(s): Ryan Donovan, Laura MacDonald, William A. Everett
Series: Routledge Theatre and Performance Companions
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 625
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of contributors
Foreword
Introduction
Part I What
Introduction: On Musicals
1 Musical Theatre Mobilities: Around the World in Eighty Years
2 An American in Tokyo? Musical Theatre Dance’s Transnational Movements
3 “How a World Can Seem So Vast”: The Craft of Musical Theatre Dramaturgy
4 The Singing Voice
5 “The Song Is You”: Song Types and Genres in Musical Theatre
Part II When
Introduction: Dark Primal Energy, Ancestor Memory, and American Exceptionalism
6 From Ballad Opera to Minstrelsy and Back: Social Class, Race, and Gender on the North American Musical Stage
7 From the 1870s Through World War I: The Spectre and Spectacle of the Human Body
8 Boom to Bust: Genre Borders, Color Lines, and Women Stars in the Musical Between the World Wars
9 World War II and the Cold War: Reflections and Refractions of Ourselves, Then and Now
10 Since the 1980s: The Global Musical Theatre Ecology
Part III Who
Introduction: Who Makes a Musical?
11 Musical Theatre Training in the Twenty-First Century: A Primer
12 “Forget About the Boy”: Women and Creative Collaborations in Musical Theatre
13 Good Gals Wear Black: Offstage Labor and the Musical
14 Mediated Taste: The Role of Critics
15 From Stage Door to Cyberspace: The Digital Evolution of Musical Theatre Fandom
Part IV How
Introduction: How Musicals Work: A Press Representative’s View
16 Fitting the Slipper: The Art of Adaptation for the Musical Stage
17 Harnessing Technology: The Evolving Labor of Design in Musical Theatre
18 Humming the Scenery: The Aesthetics of Musical Theatre Spectacle
19 “That’s Showbiz, Kid”: Casting as Process and Product
20 The Foundation, Function, and Future of the Musical Theatre Director
21 How Choreographers and Dancers Work: The Laboring Bodies of Musical Theatre
22 “The Name on Everybody’s Lips”: Marketing Musical Theatre
23 A Critical Guide to Code-Meshing, Multilingualism, and Musicals
Part V Where
Introduction: Scenes From a Showbiz Couple’s Travelogue
24 Centers of Musical Theatre
25 Pilots and Petticoats: Original Musicals in Continental Europe
26 The Broadway-Style Musical in/and Global Asias: 1920–2019
27 “One of the Best Ways to Please the Locals Is to Go to New York”: US American Regional Theatres and New Musical Theatre Development
28 “We’re All in This Together”: Student and Amateur Musical Theatre Performances
29 Mediated Musical Theatre
Part VI Why
Introduction: Into the Theatre
30 Journeys to the Past: The Uses of Memory and Nostalgia in Musical Theatre
31 What’s in a Name? The Multiplicities of the Musical
32 Interrogating America’s National Myth Onstage: Case Studies on the Individual and the Community in US Musical Theatre
33 Translating Race in Musical Theatre
34 Art Isn’t Easy (and Neither Is Commerce): The Musical Stays in the Money
35 “World”-Traveling, Diversity, Inclusion, and the Making of Musicals in the Twenty-First Century
Appendix: Towards a Taxonomy of Music Theatre Genres, A-Z
Index
